Minowa Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

On the south-eastern foothills of Mount Haruna, Minowa impresses less by its walls than by the scale of its earthworks: a moat up to about 40 m wide and 10 m deep surrounds the heart of a stronghold some 1,100 m long. Built around 1500 by the Nagano clan, the castle held for four generations. Its name remains linked to Nagano Narimasa, credited by tradition with a long resistance against Takeda Shingen, an account whose figures the historian Sasamoto Masaharu urges us to treat with caution. In 1566 the stronghold fell, and Nagano Narimori, the last head of the clan, took his own life. Minowa then became the Takeda pivot in Kōzuke, passed to the Oda and the Hōjō in 1582, and in 1590 went to Ii Naomasa, the best-endowed of Tokugawa Ieyasu's vassals with 120,000 koku. He left it for Takasaki as early as 1598, yet this brief final phase is the one that reads most clearly on the ground: excavations begun in 1998 have brought out gates, the great moat and entrances from his time. The wall of the third enclosure, 4.1 m high, is the tallest on the site, and study of the western entrance to the main enclosure has shown the reuse of funerary stones, some carved with Sanskrit characters. Since 2016, a gate rebuilt using traditional techniques has marked the western entrance of the Kuruwa-umadashi.